Going on Safari

5/27/14

Going to the bathroom at work always seems like an adventure into a dangerous land, sort of like going on safari.  I work in a mall, so there are many toilet stalls, but only one Western style toilet.  Using the Chinese floor style toilets reminds me of how little boys have to be taught to “aim” when they are learning to use the toilet.  As a girl I never had to learn to “aim,” but I need to know it now.

Usually I wait for the American toilet.  In the morning it is sometimes clean, but later in the day it is always filthy, as the Chinese choose to stand on the edges of it and use it like a Chinese toilet.  It usually has a combination of dirty footprints and what I can only assume is urine dripped on the seat cover.  So I use a wet wipe to clean it and dry it before I use it.  Toilet paper isn’t provided here, so you have to carry your own.  Honestly, I always carried some kind of tissue in America too, but there it is just on the off chance that I will need it.  Here I know I need to carry enough to get through the day, and cleaning wipes.

There is a bathroom attendant that mops the floor constantly throughout the day.  This ensures that the floor is always wet, so everyone that enters the bathroom leaves muddy footprints.  People also “miss” with the Chinese toilets, so she is mopping around them.  I don’t think she mops with any kind of soap, just water.   This also makes the bathroom always humid.  I think the mopping is supposed to make the bathroom constantly clean, but it seems to me to do the opposite.  The bathroom attendant’s job apparently doesn't extend to cleaning the counters, which always have puddles of water on them, or to cleaning the Western style toilet. 

Periodically, I feel a small sense of resentment that the bathroom is so humid, muddy, and that the toilet is always dirty when there is a cleaning lady there all day long.  I wonder why my logic of how to clean doesn't occur to her.  But I realize she must be doing her job the way she is supposed to.  The bathroom attendant at the other end of the building carries out her job exactly the same way.  So obviously they are doing what their employers and customers expect.  This makes me realize that “logic” depends on the primary assumptions it is founded on.  After all, I don’t even know enough of the native language here to do simple things, so why should my logic be valid here?  This is not my country and I can’t even function in it without help, like a child that needs a babysitter, whereas the bathroom attendant is fully functioning in her own culture and her job.  Maybe at some time the cleaning practices for public bathrooms here may become more Western, but in the mean time I just need to practice patience and humility and carry wet wipes.

Banking, Washing, and Teaching

5/12/14

Did you ever read The Cat in the Hat Comes Back by Dr. Seuss?  The Cat in the Hat eats cake in the tub and has to clean it up.  He cleans the tub it with a dress, and cleans the dress stain by putting it on the wall, the wall with shoes, and the shoes on the carpet… That’s how I feel when I do laundry here.  I start the washer in the bathroom, then I sweep and mop the balcony so I can hang the clothes out to dry without getting soot all over them.  Then I have to mop the floor inside where I tracked dirt in.  After I wash the clothes I have to clean the shower floor where the dirty water and soap are draining.  Then I mop the floor where the washer usually sits and the rest of the bathroom floor, which is dirty by that time.  When I am finished the whole house has mostly been cleaned.  But I really just started out to do laundry.

My work visa has been processed and I am back at work full time.  I set up my PIN number at the bank where my pay has been deposited and the school, “Web” for short, has given me an ATM card.  I set my account up to pay my electric bill.  The bank employee was a young man, and he spoke English pretty well, uncertain of specific words like “activate” my card, and “transfer,” but he did very well.  He was very humble about it, laughing at himself and saying it was difficult to do it all in English.  I blindly signed all the forms that were completely in Chinese, but I feel quite sure that they are all okay.  Web is a large customer of theirs, so I believe it is all safe.  The young man asked how I knew to set up my electric bill payments, and I said my co-workers (they use the word colleagues here, I’m not sure if it is the UK influence) had told me to do it.  He said I was the first foreigners to do so, and it made me look like I knew a lot about living here. 

My school had a karaoke party last night to promote team building.  There is a K-TV place in the fourth floor of the mall.  It was a lot of fun, a lot of songs in Chinese, but we had a selection of English songs to pick from.  We (the foreign English teachers) sang John Denver songs together, and The Beatles.  The Chinese employees mostly talked in Chinese together, as not all of them know English, and it was fun to mix with everyone in a social setting.

I also taught my first English Literature Social Club yesterday (it’s called English Corner at other schools, and it’s an open format where any students can come).  I had about 20 students and we read Daffodils by William Wordsworth.  I got the idea from English with a Twist Blog by Shanti http://englishwithatwist.com/2014/05/01/a-poem-by-william-wordsworth-a-giant-of-english-literature/ .  The students read through the poem stanza by stanza and we discussed what it meant word by word and line by line.  I went over new vocabulary, and at the end I asked them to write a stanza about a flower.  A couple of the students were really intimidated by it, so I said for them to just pick a flower and make a statement about how they felt about it.  Some of the students wrote quite eloquent stanzas of poetry.  I felt like the whole lesson went very well.

The subject of this series was picked by the school.  I teach 3 Social Clubs a week, with different subjects, and I feel like they have been going pretty well.  I find teaching is an up and down ride.  Sometimes everything works so beautifully, and other times activities fall flat and I feel bad for the students, that I wasn't as effective as I could have been.  But in general, I think it’s going okay.

Happy Teaching,

May Day

4/30/14

I was required to put down a two month deposit on my apartment, which, by the way, was not three months because my school talked them down.  The school loaned me money to pay it, and this month I pay it back out of my salary.  It’s all very nice, but it makes the second month in a row that I will be short of money.  It’s an interesting situation, because the cost of working here is so high up front.  But I guess that’s the way it is.

Actually, people that work for the public schools just get their housing provided for them and they don’t have to go through this process.

5/1/14

Today is International Labor Day, and May Day, and we have the day off work.   I walked to a nearby section of town called Thames Town, that is modeled after a village in England.  It was an interesting experience.  It actually has apartments and residential sections, but the village shops and everything are a tourist attraction.  It is interesting seeing the English style buildings combined with the Chinese people, food and customs.  I took a lot of pictures.  I took one of the British red phone box, with Chinese Telecom written on it, and thought of my daughter, who is a Dr. Who fan.

It is common for Chinese people to take sort of dress up and posed photos, so there are a lot of “brides and grooms” posing on the grounds of the church and hotel.  But I know this is not their wedding day, just a photo opportunity.  One photo has four couples posing in it.

The weather is getting warmer.  Today was 27 degrees C.  It was still pretty comfortable walking around, but I know the hot weather is coming next month.

5/5/14

In one of my classes I had two young women who were university students.  The practice exercise was for them to interview each other and make a “presentation” style speech, where they introduced the other one.  Their homework exercise had been to write about an achievement from their own life that they were proud of.  One young woman had studied hard to get a first prize in a math contest in high school.  Then she explained that she was studying Business English at the University and would not have to take any math classes in college.  In fact, she said, she didn’t like math and wasn’t good at it, but she had wanted to make her parents proud, so she had worked hard at the math contest.   The other young woman was studying financial management.  They were both from cities in the interior of the country, but they were in Shanghai to go to University.

It is times like that in class that make me realize that I have “the best of the best” young people in my classes.  They are smart and ambitious, and they work hard at what they want to accomplish.  They study English as an extra-curricular activity because it will help them achieve their goals.